This piece takes a peek at the servant leadership style found in the dwell of bees. When one visits a village for the first time, it is extremely possible to spot the pioneer of the rural neighborhood. This is very different with the community of bees popularly called a colony.
A close study of a bee hive will expose to us another dynamic social network. A system with distinct forms of leadership observed at the various positions from the very top to the base. Take a peek at the members which comprise the hive, their functions, positions and responsibilities is key to examine the style of leadership they operate.
These organisms are so organized that every member of this colony gets the vision of this hive entrenched in them. This ensures that they fulfill their individual responsibilities required to keep calm co-existence of the colony. This bee is saddled with only a single big responsiblity during its lifetime. Drones are found in hives up to as much as 700-800.
This member of the hive has moderate body when compared with the queen and also the worker bee. Although every drone doesn’t get the opportunity to perform this duty, the few drones that are opportune do so as at when due. This bee has got the smallest dimensions and has the biggest population from the hive.
It is responsible for constructing the hive cells, protect the eggs laid by the queen, feed the queen and drones, defend the hive, determine the gender of fresh bees and raise a new queen if the existing queen is aging and can’t produce enough royal jelly for every bee in the hive to have at least 0.01milligrams every day.
Servant Leardership: Queen
This bee has the largest magnitude among bees. It is very territorial and consequently, doesn’t provide room for the occurrence of some other queen . The moment she feels the presence of a new queen, a fight ensues and a few of these must die for the winner to either become the queen or continue as the queen as the case might be.
Gender Determination
The determination of gender is solely the obligation of the worker bee. However, the queen regulates the sex population present in the hive. She does so by opening and shutting the mouth of the sac where the spermatozoa is maintained. This sac is connected to the egg laying tube with a thin channel.
When the queen wants to lay a female egg, she contracts her muscles, drawing a couple of sperm from the small sac connected to the egg passing channel and this fertilizes the egg. As a consequence of this function, female bees hatch out of fertilized eggs while male hatch out of non-fertilized eggs. There’s not any exceptional egg to get the queen bee; Queens emerge based on how much royal jelly ingested during the larvae stage.
Though other bees consume about 3mg, the workers feed the queen cell around 9mg of royal jelly. She emerges only on the basis of nutrient differences.It’s generally believed that the queen would be the chief of a bee hive for the following reasons; She’s the smallest population — just one bee per hive.
She has the largest body size, She controls the population of bees, She secretes royal jelly; the material fed to young larvae, She’s the biggest cell size, She’s able to outlive other bees for around 5years while others die within weeks.
Servant Leadership: Conclusion
Despite all these attributes, the parasitic who performs the role of the servant leader is the worker bee. She serves another bees, hunts for the meals, cleans the hive up, guards the hive and determines the gender of bees.
Like the human community, leadership skills are also detected inside the bee colony. The worker is your servant who shows her leadership skills no matter her status in the pyramid.
Together with the daily requirement to make decisions in every period of life, so arises the daily need for leadership skills to be employed in organizations alike. A community or organization without a leader is likely to be in chaos and will find it very difficult to achieve set goals and objectives.
Servant leadership is one of the best styles of leadership and I’m of the opinion it is also one of the most effective styles of leadership.